John Stonestreet – Page 4

Abortion Isn’t Good for Anyone: Guest Column

Sep 26, 2025John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

In a recent article in National Review, Wesley J. Smith described a new study of over one million women in Quebec from 2006 to 2022. The study found that, “Compared with live births and stillbirths, patients with induced abortions had a greater risk of admission for psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders, and suicide attempts over time. ”

Also,

Abortion was associated with the long-term risk of hospitalization for psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders, and suicide attempts in models adjusted for age, comorbidity, preexisting mental illness, material deprivation, rural residence, and time period. Abortion was more strongly associated with eating disorders, hallucinogen use disorders, and cocaine use disorders.

This isn’t the first study to find that abortion, in addition to killing an innocent preborn child, is harmful for women. Back in April, the pro-life group LiveAction reported on another study which indicated that 11% of women who undergo chemical abortion suffer “serious adverse events,” a number far higher than reported by the FDA:

This means one in ten women experience at least one serious complication from taking mifepristone within 45 days—22 times higher than the “less than 0.5 percent” serious adverse events rate reported by the FDA on the mifepristone label, according to this study. The study authors state that serious adverse events in multiple categories were accounted for in the reported rate.

If abortion is truly about women’s health, as advocates claim, they should immediately demand more regulations and limits on the practice. That they do not, but rather double down on demanding abortion as a “right” demonstrates that abortion sits at the center of their worldview. After all, if it were discovered that a common prescription drug, medical procedure, or food had this same likelihood of negative side effects, there would be an immediate call to act and to ban the offending substance. There would not be nationwide rallies claiming whatever it was, was a human right. Yet, in this way and many others, abortion goes unquestioned, treated as if it is the fundamental right of a free people.

In a recently posted video, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, shared an encounter with a Michigan State student who approached her and declared, “I love abortion.” When asked what she liked about abortion, the young woman replied, “I like that people don’t die through birth, and also, babies aren’t being born to people who don’t want babies.” Unwanted babies, she continued, burden the foster care system. When asked if that meant it would be good to kill kids presently in foster care to alleviate the burden on the system, the woman was shocked anyone would suggest killing children.

Like so many, she refused to connect obvious dots and instead regurgitated talking points. Her response illustrates how challenging it has become to change hearts and minds about abortion, even when the facts are so clearly on the pro-life side. In fact, even as the facts of the matter become more obviously pro-life, commitment to abortion has grown. According to the General Social Survey, agreement with the statement “women should be able to get an abortion for any reason if she wants one” increased from 42% in 2012 to 57% in 2022.

This is how deeply held beliefs work, especially those held at a foundational worldview level. When absolute autonomy, especially sexual autonomy, is the fundamental source of human value, abortion must become an absolute. Christians who want to move the needle on abortion must understand how worldview works. It’s the only way to make sense of those who refuse the facts about abortion and those who don’t like abortion but refuse to vote to restrict it. The most dominant idea over American culture right now is that nothing should prevent people from living as they please, not even the consequences of reality.

Unless we engage, counter, and unseat this first principle of this culture’s dominant worldview, it will not matter how many studies we present or how clever our rhetoric. Yes, we should pass as many laws as possible restricting this horror, but we must also pray for God to intervene, love and serve those who are most vulnerable, and seek to persuade as many as we can.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Guest Column

Sep 19, 2025John StonestreetCulture, In MemoriamCurrent Events

*Above: Charlie Kirk speaks in Fayetteville, Arkansas. (File Photo: 2022)*

Unsurprisingly, on September 11, 2001, I wept. I also wept, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2011. Perhaps it was delayed grief, but mostly, it was a delayed realization. Sitting that Sunday morning with my young daughters, only 6, 4, and 2 at the time, it struck me how different their world was from the one I wanted for them.

The same sense struck this week, on September 10. The assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to mark a new era, a world no one wants but may very well be here. Calling the murder a “tragedy for all of us,” U.K. comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin wrote:

I hope I’m wrong. But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn’t even know was there. … [T]o murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.

Charlie’s death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don’t pray often. I am praying for them tonight. But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not.

Kisin is not wrong about lines being crossed, though the Christian must not fear. We must, however, squarely face the sober realities of this moment.

Kirk’s murder followed another this week, in Charlotte, of a young woman from Ukraine riding a public train. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a man who should have been in prison or at least institutionalized, and she was then left to die by people too engrossed in their screens to notice or too jaded to care. Together, these atrocities reveal realities about our culture and how it has shaped those within it that many will find unthinkable. But we had better think about it anyway.

Zarutska’s killer is a terrible example of the mental and social brokenness that permeates modern life. The bystanders who did not come to her defense or to her aid are, like the social media commenters and media personalities who callously commented on Kirk’s assassination, examples of the rabid and pervasive dehumanization that infects the Western world.

In a recent Breakpoint commentary, released prior to the atrocities of this week, Abdu Murray argued that this “post-truth world that elevates feelings and preferences above facts and truth has collapsed the distinction between a person’s ideas and their identity. And so, the social erasure of cancel culture has calcified into something darker.” That something darker, he argued, is “assassination culture.” He continued, “Unmoored from that objective standard for human value, we have made gods of ourselves and therefore justify eradicating any who dare to have other gods before us.”

This is precisely what Os Guinness warned of in the new film Truth Rising, that the West is squandering a unique heritage. A civilization built upon the ideal of human dignity, with a mixed and troubled history of working out that ideal, has now replaced it with something else. But racialized, sexualized, and politicized conceptions of human dignity only produce victims.

George Orwell is often credited as saying, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Charlie Kirk was a committed truth teller, with a remarkable gift for exposing and answering deceit. And yet, as he did this, he treated the deceived with the dignity they had as image bearers of their Creator, recognizing that they too were victims of their own bad ideas.

There is a cost to telling the truth. Our Lord has told us to count this cost. If Kisin is indeed correct, that cost is higher than we have imagined. This is indeed a civilizational moment. It is to this moment that we have been called as His people. As His people, we know that this moment is not some fatalistic inevitability, nor does it determine or define the Story of which we are part.

In a video circulating on social media, Charlie is asked why he went on campuses to talk with and try to persuade those who disagree with him. Charlie responded, “Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.” It was a prophetic moment, but Kirk also demonstrated that we need not accept that. He showed that the conversation can be had; that it must be had. He showed that the truth still wins hearts and minds, and that lies can be opposed. And that it can all be done with a big smile.

It takes courage to tell the truth and to, as Paul wrote, “regard no one from a worldly point of view.” As Murray wrote, only the “ancient biblical truth about what it means to be human can heal our contemporary malady.”

It can be healed. This is not wishful thinking. This is the hope Christ secured for us all. As the banner on the Turning Point USA website proclaims, Charlie Kirk has been “received into the merciful arms of our loving Savior, who suffered and died for Charlie.”

Guest Column: Where Do Human Rights Come from, Senator?

Sep 10, 2025John StonestreetCurrent EventsLiberty

Last week, democratic Senator Tim Kaine made this bold statement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing:

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

It’s one thing when a progressive media figure says something like this. For example, back in 2024, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla warned that believing human rights “don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” makes one a Christian nationalist! Even so, it’s another thing altogether when a sitting U.S. Senator and former vice-presidential candidate claims that this fundamental Christian belief is indistinguishable from Islamic fundamentalists.

Kaine’s comments were quickly condemned by fellow Senators and religious commentators for, among other things, rejecting the words of the Declaration of Independence. The Senator also failed to realize that his own belief, that rights come from government, is what every communist, fascist, and totalitarian regime in history believed. Still, the first part of the Senator’s claim is not fully wrong.

The Mullahs in Iran, like all committed Muslims, believe that human rights come from God. So do Christians. But that is where the similarities end. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has lived in cultures rooted in both Islamic and Christian notions of human rights, says in the new film Truth Rising, “You don’t have to imagine how life would be under Islam. … All you have to do is go to any of these places that Western Civilization has barely touched, and the education you’ll get is much better than Harvard.”

In fact, though Muslims and Christians agree that our rights come from God, they hold widely diverging views about what those rights are, how those rights should be understood, and how the government should recognize and enforce human rights. That’s because Muslims and Christians hold fundamentally different and conflicting ideas about who God is and who humans are.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali also points out in Truth Rising, the God of Islam reveals only his will and demands our submission to it. The true God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and offers freedom. The Christian God created humans in His own image. He “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, [so] that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” Not only does God want to be known, He made humans in such a way as to know Him. Islam refers to God as love but then reveals him to be vindictive and cruel.

According to Islam, humans have not fallen. According to Christianity, humans are sinful, having inherited a fallen nature from our first parents. If humans are inherently ordered toward sin and evil, then a government run by humans will be prone to abuse its citizens. Thus, it must be ordered toward preserving those rights which God has ordained. In an Islamic society, humans are not seen as bearing God’s image and need only be forced into submission by the state, which is inseparable from the religion.

And so, in practice, Islam looks far more like the totalitarian governments that think of human rights like Senator Kaine does. If humans do not have intrinsic dignity as individuals, individuals must be, at times, sacrificed on the altar of the state or the collective. In just the twentieth century alone, Josef Stalin oversaw the executions of 800,000 perceived political opponents in the Soviet Union, and many put the overall death toll of his policies at 20 million. In China under Mao Zedong, 15 to 45 million people were slaughtered. Cambodia under Pol Pot and Germany must also be put on this same list. Whenever and wherever human rights are attributed to the government, they are trampled. As Chuck Colson often said, “If government thinks they can grant rights, then they can also take them away.”

The very idea that humans have rights that transcend class and sex, tribe and nation, to the very individual, has had a singular source in history. In his book, A Brief History of Thought, the atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry identified that source:

“Christianity was to introduce the notion that humans were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”